Blogging about 101 Proofs for God

Three years ago I was sitting in bed praying. I had been thinking a lot about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I was 62 and thinking 30 more years was about all there was left at the most.

The thought occurred to me to pray something like this: “Heavenly Father, I know your situation is pretty tough up there because things are so messed up down here. I’ve only got about 20 good years left that I might be able to help You. What can I personally do for you with the time I’ve got left?”

The answer came in a pretty clear understanding: “My children don’t know me. Even the ones who believe in me don’t really know Me. They have no defense against the attacks of the atheists, scientists, and evolutionists who claim science and truth are on their side. It is an all-out war for the minds and hearts of my children.”

I could feel there was vast loneliness, sadness and frustration in God’s heart with this situation.

“Proofs for God” were needed. Most believers, when confronted by atheists, had very shallow proofs for God and typically could only think of a few.

Each proof would be short so anyone could read it in two or three minutes. I would cover all kinds of topics from logical proofs to serious scientific explanations and the latest research. I would avoid heavy theological and philosophical proofs. I’d write proofs that even middle-schoolers could understand. I would do the research on the latest discoveries and summarize it for their easy understanding.

I chose to post each proof as I wrote it on Blogspot. Later, I created a website that contains the full list of them. My goal is to finish #75 by the end of the year and get to #101 by the end of 2015. Then I want to turn it into a book.

It has been a tremendous journey of discovery over these last three years. I have come to believe that if you are looking for God, it doesn’t matter where you look, you will find Him absolutely everywhere. Clearly, there are some people who want to deny God exists and they do amazing mental gymnastics to prove they are right, but they are not my audience.

The atheist Richard Dawkins spent a whole chapter in his book, The Blind Watchmaker, describing the amazing abilities of bats to “echolocate” in the dark. I found Dawkins’ logic concerning evolution to be simplistic and flawed, but was very inspired by his information on bats and turned it around into a proof for God (Proof #42).

God has guided me so many times with new ideas and inspirations that cross my path. Proofs have come unexpectedly. One morning I was standing in the bathroom and I looked out the window at all the trees. I felt so much love and appreciation for the trees. They give us so much. I did a little research on trees and the proof just came flowing out like it was already written (Proof #39).

Actually it’s possible to find many top scientists starting to recognize that the idea of an Intelligent Designer is probably correct. Of course, most of them also have to be careful of having their careers ruined. But definitely the scientific evidence is swinging away from the Theory of Evolution. Almost no scientist believes in the original Darwinism any more. It has had to be modified many times because no research supports it. There is no slow gradual development. Mutation and natural selection are not workable engines for the origin of new species.

99.9% of our fossil record has been discovered since the time of Darwin, but that record contains almost nothing that could be considered transitional species, so there are millions of Missing Links (Proof #64). The fossil record in fact shows that almost all of the phyla of various species appeared in a very narrow band of time which is only about 1% of the time since the Big Bang. This disproves Darwin’s idea of slow and gradual differentiation. That band of time is being called the Cambrian Explosion (Proof #58).

I analyze the two main driving forces for Darwin: mutation and natural selection (Proof #27 and Proof #35). Neither one goes in the upward direction. Theodosius Dobzhansky, a prominent evolutionary biologist, spent years irradiating fruit flies for thousands of generations to artificially induce mutations and never produced any viable new fruit fly, let alone a new species. Even the smartest scientists trying hard can’t make mutation work! So it could never work by accident. Natural selection is a process that requires reproduction, so it couldn’t even start until advanced species already existed. Besides, it can never produce a new species, only select from among favorable traits already within the DNA. It cannot produce new information. In fact, there is a loss of genetic information.

I write about parts of the human body like the eye (Proof #45), a truly unbelievable creation. There is so much technical data on the eye that writing that proof was really hard. I also wrote about muscles (Proof #61). Nobody has any idea where muscles came from. And how could random mutation accidentally produce muscles that always occur in pairs. In humans there are exactly 320 pairs of muscles? Animals, fish, and insects of course also have muscles in pairs.

I discuss your amazing skin (Proof #63), all its sweat glands and pressure sensitivity, and the various types of hair. Just the human body alone could be used for all 101 proofs if I wanted to. Each one of us is a walking, talking miracle. Many inspirations for proofs have come to me concerning the human body. Starting with our reproductive systems and the sperm and egg, the fetus, the bodily systems, the five senses — all are truly beyond the ability of scientists to understand or duplicate. Each one is a miracle.

I write about empty space (Proof #14), the amazing properties of the Moon (Proof #49), invisibility (Proof #59), snowflakes (Proof #56), and the rapidly growing field of Life After Death and Near Death Experiences (Proof #10).

Animals are phenomenal. Fish, insects, and plants are awesome. They are all interconnected in an amazing ecosystem (Proof #54). Pacific Golden Plovers (Proof #24) fly from Alaska straight to Hawaii over the ocean, taking 70 hours without stopping, and never miss. After they leave Alaska, their eggs hatch and the babies eventually follow without any assistance. Monarch butterflies (Proof #20) travel north every year from Central America, but three generations live and die on the way until the “Methuselah generation” is born and these Monarchs fly all the way back to the same tree their ancestors started on without any GPS to help them.

Ants have elaborate systems to air condition their nests and calculate exactly how much food the nest will need and how much is going in and coming out of their storage areas. (Proof #46)

Caterpillars go into a cocoon and turn into mush, which somehow forms into a butterfly (Proof #19). Cicadas go underground for 17 years before emerging again at exactly 64°F (Proof #57).

Plants have incredible and exotic ways to pollinate (Proof #51). I also do a proof called Ugly Flowers (Proof #2). Think about the fact that there are 270,000 different types of flowers and none of them is ugly. If mutation were true, the odds are at least 50-50 that half the flowers would be ugly.

On and on it goes. The world around us is totally awesome when you start to explore it deeply. “Awesome” only comes from intelligent sources, but most especially only from beings with a loving heart.

The DNA in your body alone when stretched end to end would reach to the Sun and back 600 times. You would have to type eight hours a day for 50 years to just type out the DNA information in one cell (Proofs #21 and #30).

After 50 years as the world’s most famous atheist, Dr. Antony Flew was defeated by the discoveries about DNA and concluded in 2004 that there must be an intelligent creator (Proof #17).

A conference of esteemed mathematicians back in 1966 calculated that evolution is impossible (Proof #29).

In summary, the evidence of God is absolutely everywhere and overwhelming. This article only touches on a proofs I have compiled so far. More are coming. I am more profoundly convinced than ever of God’s existence and God’s heart that is invested in everything that was created. Each article is proof in itself, but one by one, added together they make up an almost undeniable case for anyone openly searching for the truth.

My deepest heart is that everyone can know God as their loving parent and be able to share it.♦

Jim Stephens (UTS Class of 1977) and his wife, Hiromi, were blessed among the 2,075 Couples in 1982, and have five children. He has written and spoken extensively in the American Movement about men and women, families, matching, marriage, and the Blessing, having served with Hiromi for five years as Co-Director of the Blessed Family Department.

Photo at top: The Helix Nebula, also known as The Helix, NGC 7293, a large planetary nebula located in the constellation Aquarius.

12 thoughts on “Blogging about 101 Proofs for God”

Excellent piece of work, Jim. I wish you the best in producing your book. Just having looked at a few of your “proofs of God” shows that there is a real need for intelligent and clear responses to the atheists’ assertions that there is no God. More “weapons for truth” in the armory.

Jim, congratulations on this project. I looked at your blog and could see by the wide array of topics you use in your proofs that this is having a major positive effect on the development of the horizons of your own mind and heart. What a great inspiration it was to begin this work.

I do believe in intelligent design, but without the intelligent designer. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it really isn’t.

First, let us understand what intelligence really is. Everything around us is just information. Stars, planets, trees, the oceans, birds, plants and people are all collections of atoms and molecules arranged a certain way. It’s all just information, some of which is very complex. But everything started out much simpler, first just a bunch of sub-atomic particles and then later just a bunch of hydrogen, the simplest element.

Nature also contains certain excluded combinations, rules you could call them, that came into existence when the universe spontaneously originated. Among other things this eventually gave rise to the periodic table, which allows certain combinations of sub-atomic particles to exist as observable elements while other non-permitted combinations are excluded.

Then, over time, things interacted. A lot. It all happened over billions of years. As all this stuff got stirred up, certain combinations occasionally occurred. They possessed certain advantages and were in harmony with their environment and so they persisted and hung around. But other combinations without advantages or not in harmony with the environment perished. It was all just a big, long, bunch of trial and error, followed by a lot of failures but some occasional successes, which permitted stuff to gradually climb from a lower state of order to a higher one. Sure, it sort of seems like there was a human-like intelligent designer at work. But that’s putting the cart before the horse.

It’s obvious that everything around us was intelligently designed. It happens because nature has the ability to do trial and error, to do experiments and to self-organize. This meets the definition of design. And intelligent design at that. This explains how everything got to be how it is today.

One of the things that eventually evolved through natural intelligent design was the human brain. The brain has an evolved ability to do something very special. It can plan things out. The brain after all is just an evolved, naturally created computer. Like artificial computers, made by humans, the human brain can create models and do simulations inside it. This streamlines the design process and removes the long string of trial and error required to accomplish anything such as is required in natural intelligent design. That’s why humans can rapidly design things like cars, airplanes, and submarines relatively quickly, neatly and efficiently while it took nature millions or billions of years to design horses, birds and fish that are very complex but are less well ordered when compared to man-made creations.

So there it is. You now have the horse before the cart. And it’s all pretty simple really.

The “man in the cloud theory” has been around a long time. People are comfortable with it. And the untestable promises of afterlife are very alluring. So people are reluctant to give it up. It leads to a lot of confirmation and selection bias in people’s reasoning as they try to hang onto it.

The problem with the man in the cloud theory is that it requires a pre-existing complex structure somewhere to do the same type of high-level processing that our brains perform when we are conscious. So far, no structure like that has ever been observed anywhere other than on this one single planet inside of people’s heads. “Intelligent design without the intelligent designer” does a lot better job of explaining everything.

“My children don’t know me. Even the ones who believe in me don’t really know Me. They have no defense against the attacks of the atheists, scientists, and evolutionists who claim science and truth are on their side. It is an all-out war for the minds and hearts of my children.”

Jim, your sentiment is admirable, and your answer from God is spot on… but what is the solution? Proofs of God are nice for those who already believe. However, I would say the solution is a more difficult path — we have to show that science is compatible with religion and not a prerogative of the atheist. We have to be able to claim science is on our side too, and separate the exclusive claim on science from atheism — and that can’t happen as long as we deny the validity of science (including evolution). However, there is the problem from the religious side: “Even the ones who believe in me don’t really know Me.” The more difficult path starts first from a fundamental change in the attitude of the religious, and there your proofs might help if you don’t deny the science.

The defense against the attacks of the atheists is to use science “as is” in support of religion –- this could completely deflect this particular line of attack. It may mean changing traditional religion though, but Divine Principle contains the seeds of the necessary change.

I’m happy, Jim, that you’re doing something that helps you feel useful for God, but ultimately question the real value of any of your “proofs” basically because I don’t think there is any real proof of God. If any of your proofs were really valid, virtually everyone would believe in God, just as most people believe in the proven laws of the universe. Years ago, I came across a large tome in a public library in the religion and philosophy section that refuted in detail every supposed proof of God. Essentially, I don’t believe God’s existence will anytime soon be proved or disproved. It will for the foreseeable future be basically a matter of personal experience and faith. We who believe in God can perhaps take some solace in such “proofs,” but for unbelievers, they are debatable and not real proofs at all. Even though I feel that I know God, neither I nor anyone else can convince others of His existence with theorems, especially if they are inclined not to believe or cannot feel His presence.

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